#exile

#exile

Ibtisam and her brother Raed Imran had come to Ramallah two days ago, after they got a call from Muhammad from the Israeli prison where he was held, telling them that he would be among the prisoners to be released to the West Bank. But when they arrived at the cultural centre on Monday, they were told that Muhammad was on the list, yes, but that he was among the more than 100 prisoners whom Israel had decided to exile from Palestine.

This is a novel of ideas, as well as, at its most elemental, a tangled love story. Desai's characters inhabit a complex post-modern, post-colonial world and, yet, her own sensibility as a novelist is playfully old-fashioned. Consider the contrivance Desai brazenly concocts to enable a central moment of this story: a chance meeting on an overnight train between the two title characters after they've each rejected their own families' formal attempts to arrange a marriage between them. Dickens, himself, might have blushed.

Cristosal, El Salvador's prominent human rights organization, has vacated the country due to increasing harassment and legal threats from President Nayib Bukele's government.

BACK artfully blends personal accounts of Syrian returnees with haunting visuals, revealing how deeply ingrained political trauma manifests in the subconscious minds of exiled individuals.